A strong meditation practice promises enticing benefits to the meditator—less suffering, more control over ones attention and awareness, more insight, more equanimity. Brahmavihara practice promises the cultivation of loving-kindness, compassion, and empathetic joy. The world would be a much better place if everybody suffered less, had more equanimity, and felt strong compassion and empathy with other beings. But meditation is hard! Becoming a skilled meditator, and reaping these benefits, requires probably thousands of hours of dedicated practice. Most people will just not put in this amount of effort. But maybe it doesn’t need to be this way. The field of meditation teaching seems underdeveloped, and innovative methods that make use of technology (e.g. neurofeedback) seem largely unexplored. We are interested in supporting scalable solutions that bring the benefits of meditation to many people.
Note:
I don’t actually know if meditation really has these benefits; this would needed to be established first (there should be quite some research on this by now). It seems plausible to me that meditation can be very beneficial. Several of my friends claim to have experienced significant benefits from meditation, and I think I can also point to tangible benefits in my own life.
These innovation need not be directly related to meditation; for example, one could imagine development of an extremely safe and non-addictive pharmaceutical substance that would let people experience, say, strong compassion, and thus increase compassion in everyday life (see e.g. the use of MDMA in therapy).
Are there high-quality safety trials for different meditation practices? I’ve heard of a variety of really bad side effects, usually from very intense, very goal-oriented meditative practice. The Dark Night that Daniel Ingram describes, the profligacy that Scott Alexander warned of, more inefficient perception that Holly Elmore experienced, etc. I have no idea how common those are and whether one is generally safe against them if one only meditates very casually… It would be good to have more certainty about that, especially since a lot of my friends are casual meditators.
Enlightenment at scale (provocative title :-) )
Values and Reflective Processes (?), X-risk (?)
A strong meditation practice promises enticing benefits to the meditator—less suffering, more control over ones attention and awareness, more insight, more equanimity. Brahmavihara practice promises the cultivation of loving-kindness, compassion, and empathetic joy. The world would be a much better place if everybody suffered less, had more equanimity, and felt strong compassion and empathy with other beings. But meditation is hard! Becoming a skilled meditator, and reaping these benefits, requires probably thousands of hours of dedicated practice. Most people will just not put in this amount of effort. But maybe it doesn’t need to be this way. The field of meditation teaching seems underdeveloped, and innovative methods that make use of technology (e.g. neurofeedback) seem largely unexplored. We are interested in supporting scalable solutions that bring the benefits of meditation to many people.
Note:
I don’t actually know if meditation really has these benefits; this would needed to be established first (there should be quite some research on this by now). It seems plausible to me that meditation can be very beneficial. Several of my friends claim to have experienced significant benefits from meditation, and I think I can also point to tangible benefits in my own life.
These innovation need not be directly related to meditation; for example, one could imagine development of an extremely safe and non-addictive pharmaceutical substance that would let people experience, say, strong compassion, and thus increase compassion in everyday life (see e.g. the use of MDMA in therapy).
Are there high-quality safety trials for different meditation practices? I’ve heard of a variety of really bad side effects, usually from very intense, very goal-oriented meditative practice. The Dark Night that Daniel Ingram describes, the profligacy that Scott Alexander warned of, more inefficient perception that Holly Elmore experienced, etc. I have no idea how common those are and whether one is generally safe against them if one only meditates very casually… It would be good to have more certainty about that, especially since a lot of my friends are casual meditators.